John Sutherland
Coarser Connections
E M Forster: A New Life
By Wendy Moffat
Bloomsbury 416pp £25 order from our bookshop
Concerning E M Forster
By Frank Kermode
Weidenfeld & Nicolson 180pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
Jane Austen went to the grave a virgin, leaving six full-length novels behind her. Would those novels have been better had Miss Austen had as lively a sex life as, say, slutty Lydia Bennet?
E M Forster was a virgin until the age of thirty-nine, when he had his first ‘full’ sexual experience (a ‘hurried sucking off’, Wendy Moffat informs us) with a passing soldier on a beach in Alexandria.
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